Photo by chokola from Flickr used under Creative Commons
Last week’s kerfuffle about foursquare and how it exposes you to would-be burglars was hilarious to me.
More accurately, it’s Twitter that poses the risk, which isn’t a new problem. Foursquare encourages people to socialize their game-playing by adding friends from Facebook, Twitter and GMail. As with any service, this is to their advantage.
Although, I would argue foursquare is not a classic social network and should not be played with the same cast of interwebs characters with whom you tweet, the majority of people join foursquare and immediately invite their entire list of followers.
So many people merrily broadcast their movements about town to a network of people they “know” from Twitter. Not something I’d recommend, but hey, what do I know.
This obviously isn’t a fourquare problem.
The tongue-in-cheek burglary site points out a different problem, i.e. that if you’ve authenticated Twitter, you can broadcast your checkins there as well, which in turn announces your location not only to your followers, but to everyone on the intertubes thanks to Twitter search, Google and Bing.
By announcing to everyone that you’re not home, you’re making yourself easier to rob.
ZOMG.
Thankfully there have been many level-headed responses (my favorite) to this attempt to “raise awareness”. First off, I’d expect that a burglar savvy enough to find this information would steal identities, rather than take a meat life risk.
Second, in order to rob someone who’s not home, you have to know where they live, which is not something as easily garnered from Twitter.
Yeah, it’s risky to tell Twitter you’re not at home, but let’s be honest, on the internet thar be dragons, quickly becoming my favorite quote, so it’s all risky.
What turns out to be the biggest risk about foursquare is that many people checkin to their homes and their friends’ homes. Since foursquare has an API, you have no way of knowing who’s using your checkin data for what.
In actuality, none of these are foursquare problems, they’re simply misunderstandings on the user’s behalf. Although, as we’ve seen with the recent “facebook login” hat dance, it doesn’t always matter where blame falls.
Sound off with your thoughts in comments.
